Lucking Out (30 page)

Gelsey. A name that falls in the mind’s ear like a sprig of mint. I had fallen for her like a fool since I had first seen her at New York City Ballet, a dancer of Keatsian ethereality—such a cameo face—and yet utterly without coy affectation or approval-catering. Petite, precise, and imperishably young, she appeared enveloped in a personal quiet so profound that she seemed to dance under a glass bell, like an enchanted cricket. Not that she was crunchable. She was one tough little apparition, otherworldly and all there, her tiny little traveling steps in Balanchine’s
La Sonnambula
while holding a candle a Gothic vision that escaped from the Brontë attic. Offstage, Kirkland was rumored to be a cactus handful, the sketchy rumors of her erraticism that one overheard at the line for the water fountain confirmed by her 1986 memoir,
Dancing on My Grave
, where she shocked the ballet world with her tales of coke-snorting, eating disorders, collagen treatment, and giving Balanchine back talk. The critic Wilfrid Sheed, reviewing a steaming plate of angry tell-it-like-it-is athletes’ memoirs, once wrote, “The literature of nausea has come to professional football: the ‘I Was a Vampire for the Chicago Bears’ school for one crowd, and ‘I Was a Rich Owner’s Plaything’ for another.”
Dancing on My Grave
was the literature of nausea’s first venture into tutus, but, onstage, in her prime, none of her personal demons poked through, at least to my un-clinical eye. She spun pure silk out of herself, so becalmed and mission-borne that she seemed to be erasing the connecting dots of the choreography in a continuous breath of movement, in thrall to a higher calling and a guidance system she had personally installed. Gelsey was more than poetry in motion; she could explode out of the bass drum with her own armory show of pyrotechnics, as in the can-you-top-this? trade-off solos in the
Don Quixote
pas de deux, where she tore off those pirouettes as if daring Baryshnikov to sass her back. Technique and artistry animate ballet, as they do any performing art, but the mystery and alchemy of presence are what open the dome, making you realize there’s more to this world than this world. Memory is such a patchy recording device of performance, and the fugitive clips of Baryshnikov and Kirkland together that surface on YouTube or other video portals preserve only tapestry pieces of their performances, a small, unrepresentative highlight sample that only traps the ghosts of those unrepeatable passing moments of live performance. But they also affirm that we weren’t wrong then, they really were that graced, and nothing about them has dated, except Misha’s Galahad mop of golden hair, more suitable for a Bee Gee. Baryshnikov made the cover of
Time
magazine in May 1975, the same month that
A Chorus Line
opened off-Broadway at the Public Theater before moving to Broadway; a month later, that ice bucket of dousing cynicism,
Chicago
, created by John Kander and Fred Ebb and choreographed by Fosse, debuted on Broadway. The astrological configuration for 1975’s midyear must have been
awesome.
Gelsey herself went on to make the cover of
Time
in 1978, photographed snapping a fan in mid-jump as Kitri in
Don Quixote
above the headline U.S. BALLET SOARS. The exuberance of the shot is a wistful reminder of Kirkland at the peak of her artistry and popularity, how broadly the dance boom had brightened into public consciousness, and how far the print media have culturally slid since then into the far side of moronica, the days long gone when any of the newsmagazines would consider any of the performing arts cover-worthy, because none of their editors know anything apart from what they read online or what’s memo’d on the inside walls of their bunker mentality.

When I think of what was waiting on the other side of the dance boom’s soaring crest, the darker afterwash and long plateau, another matinee comes to mind, one quite different from my first at New York City Ballet, one separated by a decade. (By then, I had moved to a smaller mouse-hole in the East Village, just in time for the crack era.) This was the NYCB matinee when the principal dancer Darci Kistler was scheduled to perform after a long absence due to injury, a layoff that had seeded suspicion and resentment, rumors that Darci might be a perfectionistic head case like Gelsey. Her appearances had been sporadic even before this extended recoup, her name dropped from the cast abruptly like the scheduled 3:10 train from New Haven removed from the station board due to track failure. Darci was getting a George Jones reputation as a reliably unreliable no-show, though of course nobody imagined her knocking back Johnnie Walker Red in the back of a trailer. But her elusive butterfly dartings had become vexatious to those who loved her. So much had ridden on Darci’s shoulders since she had first emerged from the stable that her absences were a deprivation, a denial of a great dancer in her prime. She had been the last of the Balanchine ballerinas, appearing first onstage at the age of sixteen in major roles and revealing a coltish, unself-conscious transparent cursiveness that had many reaching for the word “preternatural.” She was the heiress of the Balanchine ideal and ballet’s torchbearer for the future, a future that looked precarious after the death of Balanchine in 1983, whose last works were solos choreographed for Farrell, who would retire from the company in 1989. Without Balanchine as presiding, animating spirit, NYCB, ballet itself, was in danger of ossifying into a preservation society. Whatever doubts and irritation over the long gaps between performances, everyone wanted Darci’s return to be triumphal, a faith-restorer, not so much a comeback (she was too young for that) as a coming home.

Everybody was there that sunny, light-spilling day. Arlene Croce and assorted other dance critics, forming clots. Susan Sontag and whatever scary person she was with. Regular faces whose names I didn’t know, and a face whose name I did know who was a friend of both Arlene’s and Pauline’s, a literary critic who looked like Lytton Strachey when he held a cigarette aloft, the smoke chimneying upward as if leaving cares behind. He had a slight stammer too, as I recall, the fitful effort it took to insert a word into the loading chamber when he sensed his vocal mechanism about to jam, which also made me think of Bloomsbury, Oxbridge dons, the tapping of cigarette ashes. Though given that he had been born and raised in the Deep South, Tennessee Williams on the veranda would have been a closer invocation, but Williams didn’t send off the scent of the library stacks; A. did. He was in a bad way, his uneven shoulders holding him up like a bent clothes hanger. He had lost noticeable weight, something had wrung out of him. It was difficult for him to stand, even more painful to sit, so much fleshy padding had been skimped from his bones. He said that he had come from his sickbed—adding, “Don’t worry, I’m not contagious”—and knew that he shouldn’t have, “but I couldn’t miss this.” This being Darci’s return. He would die of an AIDS-related illness some years later, survived by his companion, a phrase more insufficient than most in the language of mourning.

After the performance, everyone was chatting madly away like song sparrows about Darci’s return, how she moved and looked, the condition her condition was in. I can’t remember whom I talked to, must have been someone. Here and there were coveys of young female dancers, all legs shooting upward and pony manes and wrist flicks, most of them students of the School of American Ballet dressed in their afternoon best, cliqued together going over Darci’s performance with their own method of instant replay, imitating and mimicking her turns and combinations, how she extended her arms, positioned her pinkie fingers, came to a stop that was never a complete stop, the next step pouring out of it. Some of these ballet students would have flourished and entered the corps ranks of NYCB or some other company, they may have already come and gone in their dancing careers by now, had their shot and taken it. But on that afternoon they were loose bracelets of girls uninterrupted, still sprouting, graceful and ungainly, half-sophisticated, half-creaturely, chatting and laughing, their tiny pocketbooks slung over their shoulders, the bracelets breaking up as the bell-tones sounded the end of intermission. I go to the ballet now, I’m married to a dance critic, something that just had to be, and in the corridors and lobby and on the balcony overlooking the Lincoln Center square and geysering fountain, there are different girl dancers shadowboxing now, marking what they’ve just seen, and yet they’re the same girls, replenished. I love being able to look at them with unwanting eyes and careful not to look too long, looks being so easily mislaid.

For those of us who lived in New York in the seventies and felt as if this is where our real lives began despite wherever it was we were marking time before, the opening montage of Woody Allen’s
Manhattan
—the city photographed by Gordon Willis in a black-and-white panorama of enshrining shadows and blinking signs; the elevated subway inching like a Lionel model train past Yankee Stadium, whose lights glow like birthday-cake candles; the mute mosaic of skyscrapers, silhouetted bridges, billowy steam clouds, snow-laden streets, thronged sidewalks, and traffic honks silenced as George Gershwin’s
Rhapsody in Blue
builds to a fireworks climax—is more than a beautiful overture, a midnight valentine. It carries ambiguous undernotes, emotional motes that never quite settle. When the film came out in 1979, the montage appeared to soar with nostalgia for the present, the sense that (to quote the Carly Simon lyric) “these are the good old days.” Even with the surefire laugh line in Allen’s narrative voice-over about the city being “a metaphor for the decay of contemporary society,” the Gershwin-Willis opening was a balm for every bruise that New York had taken in the seventies, a relieved sigh from the trenches signaling that perhaps the worst was over, somehow we had come through. To some, this relief had a tincture of wishful thinking. “In the most wry way, to anyone who knows the Manhattan of potholes and poverty and rudeness, the film is a fable—written by Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman—about a city of smooth rides and riches and thoughtfulness,” wrote Penelope Gilliatt in
The New Yorker.
To others, it was an
ironic
fable, the grandeur of the cityscape, the vertical climb of the arrow-topped towers and Gershwin score, being so much grander a stage than its characters with their scratchy dilemmas and violin-tuned neuroses deserved.

Nineteen seventy-nine was also the year of the publication of John Leonard’s
Private Lives in the Imperial City
, its title the perfect subhead for Allen’s
Manhattan.
A collection of Leonard’s columns from the
New York Times
, a weekly report from the bay window of Leonard’s Zeitgeist receptor,
Private Lives in the Imperial City
was to the needily narcissistic seventies what Candace Bushnell’s
Sex and the City
would be to the stiletto-clicking, dangling-price-tag nineties. It’s difficult to overstate how omnipresent Leonard was as a baroque calligrapher of the bobbing cultural stream in the seventies, broadcasting on so many frequencies as critic and commentator, his sentences rolling across the page like a player piano programmed by the Irish absurdist Flann O’Brien on a liberal arts bender, tight yet loose compositions that yoked together cultural-literary-political-pop references in ragtime syncopation:

Idiosyncratic as Leonard’s allusion-clustered prose was, his Private Lives column exemplified the
Times
’s thrust into lifestyle, service, and trend-spotting features under the managing editor, A. M. Rosenthal, who gleefully pirated Clay Felker’s carbonated formula for
New York
magazine and brought out the Weekend Edition, which begat the Sports, Home, Science, and Living sections. Like Allen, Leonard in Private Lives had a specimen-pinning eye and a psychoanalyst’s ear for the overthunk vanities of sophisticated brunchers tangling up their nerves on the soundstages of their overarching self-importance. Meanwhile, the spires of Manhattan stood by like obelisks, unmoved by such dramas, having witnessed millions of cast changes before.

But Woody’s
Manhattan
was more than just a study of some private lives in the imperial city, a matte exhibition of love and confusion from the vantage point of Table 8 at Elaine’s, his personal table. (It is at Elaine’s where, against the Altmanesque rustle and bustle of egos, we first meet the Amazon nymphet Tracy, played by Mariel Hemingway, who, when asked the aboriginal New York question, “And what do you do?” answers with guileless aplomb: “I go to high school.”) Visually, the movie joins the social and the spatial dimensions of the city together in tense embrace. For real estate was about to become everyone’s demanding mistress. Compared with the tiny, rattletrap apartments of
Annie Hall
, the interiors of
Manhattan
look like shadow boxes, shipping containers for larger ambitions. By 1979, affluence has found room to stretch its bony arms, freeing more breathing space for the psychological fidgets and romantic quandaries of Woody’s ensemble. The fading hippie-boho spirit poured into the Modigliani string-bean figure of Shelley Duvall in
Annie Hall
(she was the
Rolling Stone
baby journalist who found a concert featuring a robed, garlanded guru “transplendent”) is nowhere to be found in
Manhattan
, everyone being too busy beavering away at their careers. “In
Annie Hall
, Diane Keaton sings from time to time, at a place like Reno Sweeney’s,” wrote Joan Didion in a disdainful notice of
Manhattan
in the
New York Review of Books.
“In
Manhattan
she is a magazine writer, and we actually see her typing once, on a novelization, and talking on the telephone to ‘Harvey,’ who, given the counterfeit ‘insider’ shine to the dialogue, we are meant to understand is Harvey Shapiro, the editor of
The New York Times Book Review.
” Actually, it’s so inside it’s pitch-dark, but let it go. The keenest perception Didion has concerns that famous list of things worth living for that Woody confides to his tape recorder, a roll call of redeeming greatness for the mediocre crapitude of existence that includes Groucho Marx, Willie Mays, Louis Armstrong’s “Potato Head Blues,” and Flaubert’s novel
A Sentimental Education.
“This list of Woody Allen’s is the ultimate consumer report,” Didion writes, “and the extent to which it has been quoted approvingly suggests a new class in America, a subworld of people rigid with apprehension that they will die wearing the wrong sneaker, naming the wrong symphony, preferring
Madame Bovary.
” That subworld was about to surface, conquer, and colonize. Consumerism in sneakers was where the culture was moseying before eventually sprinting in the eighties, our tastes on the lookout for any false step.

I, however, rode the rising surf in the wrong direction, managing somehow to move up professionally while knocking my quality of life down a notch. In the late seventies, my career had started to go slick. Still writing for the
Voice
, I would be hired as a columnist at
Esquire
, the Don Draper of sixties magazines, whose columnists at various times had included Norman Mailer, Dwight Macdonald, the English gadfly Malcolm Muggeridge (who, after his religious conversion, would enjoy a third-act career revival as “St. Mugg,” the praise-singer of Mother Teresa), and Kingsley Amis, heroes all.
Esquire
had changed ownership in 1979, purchased by Chris Whittle and Phillip Moffitt, a team of Tennessee investors who were greeted with the askance condescension New York publishing kept on ice for anyone perceived as provincial and soft-padded, possible banjo-pickers. After the financially ruinous tenure of the previous editor, Clay Felker, who had converted
Esquire
from a monthly to a fortnightly (“an ingenious scheme to lose money twice as fast,” someone pointed out), the non-nudie men’s title needed a savior, only the Tennessee Two didn’t fit anyone’s fantasy twin bill of the reincarnation of
Esquire
’s founder Arnold Gingrich and Harold Hayes, the editor who ran the ranch in its New Journalism renaissance. Who could have? Their outside status may have immunized them to the daunting weight of institutional lore that would have crushed those who approached the magazine as a sacred trust. They took proper care of the property. Unlike the entrepreneurs, arbitrageurs, and turnaround kings who would vulture attack vulnerable businesses to strip assets, cut payrolls, and enrich shareholders, leaving behind skeletal remains and a debauched brand, the Tennessee Two weren’t out for a quick kill. Where Felker had salvaged the
Village Voice
by dragging it into the future with iron claws, Whittle and Moffitt propped
Esquire
back on its feet with deerskin gloves, dusting it off and making it respect itself again, no matter how much the other kids laughed at it. Moffitt, who would become editor to Whittle’s publisher, conducted business in his office with a bluegrass lilt to his voice that was as far away from Felker’s seal bark as could be imagined. It was like listening to a transcript of James Taylor’s greatest croons, and although
Esquire
revitalized itself by catering to baby-boomer consumerism (yuppies in their puppy stage, discovering the talismanic powers of the perfect saucepan), it was little surprise decades later to discover that Moffitt had become a yoga guru, preaching the dharma of nonattachment.

He was not the one who talent-scouted me. Contact was made by Lee Eisenberg, who, knowing my devotion to a certain black feline, had a bag of kitty litter delivered to my door. The editor to whom I was assigned at
Esquire
was a young woman in her mid-twenties named Dominique Browning, imaginative, scarily proficient, bound for the higher rafters of magazine-dom, with transfixing crystal blue eyes whose glance always seemed to catch you unawares even if you had been looking forward to it the entire elevator ride up to
Esquire
’s floor. I had a crush on Dominique. Everyone had a crush on Dominique. There was a secret society of Dominique infatuees who stroked her name aloud as if it had dove wings. I probably fantasized that
she
would be the editorial Suzanne Pleshette to my rippling raw-talent James Franciscus in
Youngblood Hawke
, only Dominique wasn’t droll and raven-dark like Pleshette posing in doorways and I couldn’t quite get a Jungle Jim ripple going. It was certainly for the best, my opportunities for embarrassment more usefully deployed offstage, enabling me to maintain the facade of cool professionalism that existed whenever I practiced it in the men’s room mirror.

In 1979, I also published my first piece for the
New York Review of Books
, a roundup of books about television, the subject mattering less than the fact that I was being initiated, if not fully inducted, into the intellectual Sky Club, where Gore Vidal, Susan Sontag, V. S. Pritchett, Elizabeth Hardwick, Isaiah Berlin, Mary McCarthy, and I. F. Stone were contributors. In my middling twenties then, I was probably the youngest of the paper’s contributors, whose median age was somewhere around the half-century mark and would only climb to Methuselah heights. My first arrival at its offices on West Fifty-seventh underlined my unripened status. I was sitting in the outer office, waiting to go over my copy, when Barbara Epstein came out with an air of dispatch and handed me a manila envelope as if it contained codes that needed to be delivered to HQ, fast. “It’s a doorman building,” she said, “but make sure the doorman buzzes the apartment while you’re there—” At which point the editor Robert Silvers rode to the rescue by popping out of his office and saying, “No, no, that’s not a messenger—he’s one of our contributors.” That I was mistaken for a messenger might have been mortifying if I had owned much in the way of pride, but I prided myself on my lack of pride. (I was only sorry that I didn’t get a chance to check out the address on the envelope, imagining myself “dropping something off” for Didion or Sontag.) Lack of undue pride, overprizing one’s lack of pretense, has a self-punitive side, a penalty tax, I recognize now. If only such enlightenments arrived when they could do you some good. A healthier dash of self-worth and I might not have finished out the seventies where I did, pacing the ceiling.

Unable to pull enough together for a down payment on my apartment when the building on Horatio went co-op, I was in luck. I was offered an apartment on St. Marks Place that a former girlfriend was vacating, which I could sublet until the lease was up and have renewed in my name. Making the hazardous journey from West Village to East, I saw the apartment as a stopgap, a stepping-stone to the next chapter of my ruthless climb to the top of the middle, but I would stay there for ten years, as if serving out a sentence handed down from an unknown court. True, it was a rent-stabilized apartment, something so coveted in New York real estate that tenants would hold on to one until their toenails had turned yellow, their bodies had gone scarecrow, and they had become shut-in hoarders, until the inevitable day fell when neighbors would notice “a funny smell” wafting from the apartment, and out came the carcass, buried under a rotting pyramid of pet-food cans. I suppose there are worse ways to go. Incarceration wasn’t too bad for, oh, the first six or seven years, but the longer I stayed, the harder it became to leave, despite the lack of amenities that less evolved societies took for granted. It was a studio like the one on Horatio, but smaller, darker, sulkier. Horatio had two windows into which sunsets could wash. St. Marks had one window that snatched a meager slice of morning light. No air-conditioning, no cable hookup, and a bathroom where I could hear every gurgle upstairs. I never had the walls painted, letting them fade to a festive laundry gray. Homeless alcoholics, holed up on the roof for informal meetings, deposited empty bottles in the rain gutters, sending water slopping over the sides during torrential storms and cascading down the back wall, often leaking through the tops of sills and giving the inside walls small-scale topographical maps of severe beach erosion. With my studio located on the floor conveniently above the garbage room, mice didn’t have far to come to visit. I once dispatched a mouse with a broom after it dropped in around three o’clock at night, swinging at it like Dustin Hoffman in
Straw Dogs
while my cat, Gully, sedately sat by and monitored the situation, interested in seeing how this would turn out. Once the mouse was suitably flattened (not something I enjoyed doing, but glue traps seemed more sadistic and the snap of mousetraps too guillotine), I, sweat drenched on this summer night by the sudden exercise, gave Gully a silent look of reproach for falling down on the job as a mouser. I may have actually voiced something like this aloud, since a person who lives alone with a pet is prone to carrying on one-sided conversations. As I prepared to sweep the dead mouse into a dustpan, Gully trotted over to the radiator, reached behind it with her paw, and scooped out a decomposed mouse body that had been there so long it looked mummified, it too unable to give up a rent-stabilized apartment. Rather than tote the dead mouse in her mouth, she scooted it over with her paw and left it next to the fresh body, as if to say, Since you’re disposing of that one, how ’bout getting rid of this one while you’re at it? Cats really do have their nerve.